Belonging to God, Not to the World, Seventh Wednesday of Easter, May 27, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Wednesday of the Seventh Week of Easter
Memorial of Saint Augustine of Canterbury
May 27, 2020
Acts 20:28-38, Ps 68, Jn 17:11-19

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were considered in today’s homily: 

• Today we continue to enter into Jesus’ prayer to the Father on Holy Thursday. Jesus says out loud the reason why he was speaking out loud to the Father, “I speak this in the world so that they may share my joy completely.” He said them aloud so that the apostles could hear them — and through them, we could hear them — and that we might share the joy Jesus came into the world to give us. Yesterday we focused on Jesus’ glorifying the Father and his leaving us in the world so that we might continue that work of glorification, by completing Jesus’ mission. Today Jesus mentions five different aspects of how we’re to complete that mission in communion with God and with each other.
  • The first is a mind-blowing reality: He says that he’s one with the Father and he wants us to be as united to each other as the Father and the Son are united. That’s a gift of the Holy Spirit to bring about our communion just as he is the loving communion of the Father and the Son. Two days ago, we marked the 25th anniversary of St. John Paul II’s encyclical on Christianity Unity, “Ut Unum Sint,” taken from these words, “May they be one.” Insofar as Jesus will mention these words tomorrow twice more, we’ll leave them until then.
  • Jesus stresses not once but twice that he doesn’t belong to the world and we shouldn’t belong to the world, emphasizing that we do not belong to the world “any more” than he does. Those are extraordinary words. He says that we’re supposed to have the same relationship to the world that he does and that we shouldn’t belong to the world any more than he.
  • The way he brings about that “not belonging to the world” is he helps us to belong to the Father. He asks the Father to consecrate us so that we might belong to the Father just like he belongs to the Father. To be consecrated means to be cut off from the profane (sacer) to be with (con) God to such a degree that we share the mission the Father gave the Son. Jesus wants to cut us off from the world to be united to him so that united to him we might come out of love for the world to continue his work, so that the world might be saved.
  • The way we will be consecrated to the Father is “in the truth” of his word. He is the Truth. He is the Word made flesh. To be consecrated in the truth means that we remain in him. It also means that we earnestly seek to remain in him through his Word, that we listen to his words as words to be done, words that help us to enter more deeply into the communion of God. That means we are “living the truth” and not attached to the world and the prince of this world, who is the father of lies.
  • But Jesus knows that even after our consecration in baptism, we are still vulnerable, and so he asks the Father to protect us, just as Jesus himself sought to protect us in the Father’s name. He says that the world will hate us because, like him, we do not belong to the world, and the darkness of the world will seek to extinguish the light of Christ. For that reason, Jesus prays, not that we be taken out of harm’s way, but that we be protected from the Evil One and what the Evil One ultimately wants to accomplish, which is to make us worldly and through that alienate us forever from God. The response of Jesus to that diabolical strategy is consecration. He teaches us to relate to the Father and to want the Father’s protection as an aspect of our belonging to him. That’s why he teaches us to pray in the Our Father, “Deliver us from the evil one.”
• There’s a central point to Jesus’ prayer for us: he wants us in the middle of the world, as salt, light and leaven. There’s a tendency to try to say, “The world is evil. I’m getting out of here.” There are many, upset with the direction of society and culture, who are promoting a so-called “Benedict option,” named after St. Benedict, saying we all need to retreat far from the world while the world corrodes around us. That’s not only a misinterpretation of what St. Benedict did but also a failure to grasp what the Gospel requires. St. Benedict and the Benedictines lived in monasteries precisely so that they could be strengthened by God, strengthen each other, and allow others to be strengthened, and be more equipped to cooperate in the world’s salvation as salt, light and leaven. Just like soldiers often retire at night to the safety of the base but leave the base on the morrow in order to continue the campaign, so that’s what the oasis of the monastery provides: not a permanent residence per se, but a base from which to launch more effectively at a time of chaos the new evangelization needed. Jesus prayed that the Father not take his disciples from the world, but consecrate them in the truth so that we could go out into a world that would hate us and make it a place of divine love.
• St. Paul got this message and lived it. He retired for 14 years to Arabia to pray, and seven more years in his native Tarsus, and it was from there that he became the greatest missionary in Church history. In his final words to the presbyters of Ephesus meeting him in Melitus, he reiterated three of the points of Jesus’ prayer, which summarized what he tried to live and to form in the first Christians:
  • Jesus as Jesus prayed that the Father protect the flock of those entrusted to his care, St. Paul instructed the priests to “Keep watch over yourselves and over the whole flock of which the Holy Spirit has appointed you overseers, in which you tend the Church of God that he acquired with his own Blood.” He warned them to be vigilant in this way because the Evil One would be at work, trying to attack the Church from within and without, to disrupt the consecration, to destroy the unity, to replace the truth with a lie. He said, “After my departure savage wolves will come among you, and they will not spare the flock.” We would see those savage wolves in the Roman emperors and soldiers who for 250 years assailed the Church. But they would not be the only ones. “From your own group,” Paul continued, “men will come forward perverting the truth to draw the disciples away after them.” These would be the heretics who would try to change the Gospel to suit their own desires, rather than change their desires to conform with the Gospel. So St. Paul said, “Be vigilant,” reminding them of his three years of tears admonishing them about the false gospels so that they might live the true one.
  • Jesus as Jesus prayed to the Father that the disciples may be consecrated in the truth, St. Paul likewise entrusted them to God in the truth of God’s word. “I commend you to God and to that gracious word of his that can build you up and give you the inheritance among all who are consecrated.” Consecration in the word of God builds us up in communion, it unites us, and it gives us the inheritance of God.
  • This leads us to share Christ’s mission, to be sent out into the world as Christ was sent by the Father, as the apostles and Paul were sent by Christ. “It is more blessed to give than to receive,” Paul reminds them, and his mission to the world out of the love God has to save the world is a far greater gift than remaining apart from the world exclusively with God. God loved us so much that he gives us the privilege to give with him as generously as we have received from him.
• Someone who similarly lived out in correspondence to the fruits of Jesus’ prayer was St. Augustine of Canterbury. He was the superior of a Benedictine Monastery in Rome and chosen by the founder of the first Benedictine Monastery in Rome — St. Gregory the Great — to lead a mission of 40 monks to reevangelize the British isles after the Romans left and the Saxons invaded, leading the Christians who were there to go for the most part into hiding. The reputation of the Saxons was that of “savage wolves” and many of the missionary monks traveling with him, when they started to hear more about them after arriving in France, wanted to turn back. Augustine returned to Rome to consult with Pope Gregory, but returned to France buttressed. They made the journey. They sought to unite the Christians there, including the Celtic bishops, but for the most part failed. They tried to help people receive the word of God — most scholars think that that is why St. Augustine was chosen, because he was an expert in the Scriptures. They tried to bring people to baptismal consecration and to live in the world but apart from it. Their labors are still bearing fruit 1400 years later.
• The greatest way we live out all of the truths contained in Jesus’ prayer is here at Mass, where in the midst of the world, we consecrate ourselves anew within Jesus’ consecration in the Mass to the Father. This is where we each morning reiterate before all that we belong to God and not to the world as, within the world, we are strengthen against the wiles of the evil one to complete Jesus’ mission!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Gospel JN 17:11B-19

Lifting up his eyes to heaven, Jesus prayed, saying:
“Holy Father, keep them in your name
that you have given me,
so that they may be one just as we are one.
When I was with them I protected them in your name that you gave me,
and I guarded them, and none of them was lost
except the son of destruction,
in order that the Scripture might be fulfilled.
But now I am coming to you.
I speak this in the world
so that they may share my joy completely.
I gave them your word, and the world hated them,
because they do not belong to the world
any more than I belong to the world.
I do not ask that you take them out of the world
but that you keep them from the Evil One.
They do not belong to the world
any more than I belong to the world.
Consecrate them in the truth.
Your word is truth.
As you sent me into the world,
so I sent them into the world.
And I consecrate myself for them,
so that they also may be consecrated in truth.”

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